9.30.2010

Yak Is Whack.

A wonderful friend and I visited Montgomery Woods this weekend, and as we were driving back to the coast on the Comptche - Ukiah Road, we passed these... these... What would you call these, exactly?

Whatever you call them, I bet you could shear them and make sweaters out of their wool. Presuming you could get close enough with the clippers. Considering those horns, you and the yak would first have to come to some sort of agreement or understanding...

Whatever they are, they live on the Shambhala Ranch.

When you go to the Shambhala Ranch Retreat website, they tell you everything you'd ever want to know about having a conference or wedding at the ranch but they don't say a word - not one word - about their yaks. They repeatedly make the point that the name of their establishment was picked out by the "previous owners" (who had hippie cooties, I presume), yet they don't so much as mention the gigantic, wooly, horned beasties standing right out in front of their sign.

The yak, Bos grunniens, is a long-haired bovine found throughout the Himalayan region of south Central Asia, the Tibetan Plateau and as far north as Mongolia and Russia. In addition to a large domestic population, there is a small, vulnerable wild yak population.